/lit/ - Literature

>>22906703
about faith, evil and jesus

it's the literary equivalent of Jackass. You're supposed to laugh at Don Quixote getting hurt and then wonder what ridiculous stunt he's going to do next.

>>22906703
It's a hostile parody of popular fiction in Spain in the early 17th century.

>>22907311
don quixote would have bouts of lucidness where he tells sancho that he feels alive when he deludes himself. why do you think inaction weakens him? it's a lesson.

>>22906703
A pure soul considered mad in a world that has gone insane. a decisive satire of bourgeoisie morality against the backdrop of a forgotten noble past.

>>22907317
Don Quixote isn't lucid. He's an expert on chivalry, so when he rants about chivalry he sounds like an expert. But it's no different from Chris-chan talking about his Pokemon collection.

tilting at windmills

>>22906703
It’s a cautionary tale about the consumption of lies and misinformation.

>>22907318
>against the backdrop of a forgotten noble past
But that's the thing - the noble past that Don Quixote dreams about is not forgotten, it is invented. The book makes a point of showing that the ideals of virtue, honesty and valor are very much real, but they are also definitely not forgotten, kept by kind honorable people. At the same time, multiple stories of various characters also make a point of violently trampling on the principles of noble warfare and pure courtly love as something that never existed. It is ultimately a blatant inversion of the system of noble and forgotten past, which was a tremendous cliche at the time of the book's writing - Cervantes all but blatantly states that the past was not as ideal as we imagine, while virtues of the past are not lost but instead carried on by the noble people of the new time, courageous soldiers instead of knights, generous merchants instead of feudal lords and learned scholars instead of monks.

>>22906703
a slapstick comedy about a silly old guy and his sidekick

>>22906703
Having fun with friends.

>>22906703
I like how Cervantes got so buttmad at the fact that someone wrote a fanfic sequel to the first book that he spent a huge portion of the second book shitting on it.

>>22906703
it's about a madman and his silly antics

>>22906703
You are never too old to follow your dreams.

From the 16th Century, red-pilled noblemen had to paths to go: Quijote and Oblomov.

>>22907956
All I know from this thread is that /lit/ dropped Don Quixote at part 1

>>22907933
it really is the first post-modern novel

>>22907933
if the fanfic author was clear about his book being a fanfic Cervantes probably wouldn't have cared.

I truly do hope I hit my Don Quixote arc when I get older. I'm 26 at the moment with a stable enough job and live with my parents due to the god awful economy. I'm just accruing money and skills and writing works of fiction I may never publish but when I get older I truly wish to descend into a sort of valorous madness and leeroy jenkins myself into a series of nonsensical scenarios that leaves people thinking perhaps I wasn't crazy but the world around me was crazy. Not in some abstract hipster way but in a genuine sense that a man who never gives up on his crazy dreams is more lucid than a system built around him telling him nothing but "Give up"

>>22907963
One of my biggest regrets in life was burning a full edition of Don Quijote in a pitfire, but I only did it because the book had a scene about book burnings. It gave it's last glimpses showing the drawings of particular scenes in glowing red.

>>22906703
A guy who can't understand or appreciate the world as it is and is stuck in the past, a past he never lived but only imagines.

>>22907989
A true comparison would be against McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which boils down to the idea that there is no room for Quixotes in the modern world and that you should just embrace the unknowability and abstract nature of reality instead of wishing it were not so.

>>22907963
How do you know this? BTW the first part is all you need to read. Spare me the meta-fiction soiface response.>>22907975

>>22906703
We laugh at a mentally ill guy

>>22908021
Its a common occurance on this board and many others to court favor among the other nameless faceless individuals here by downplaying some vast general intelligence of some unseen horse of other faceless nameless individuals. It's a demonstration of someone's general desire to court public favor and should be met with complete disregard, disgust and an admission that they are no different than the idealized retard they have portrayed. You are replying to an idiot masking his true desire for acceptance under a thin veneer of cynicism and competence achieved only through putting others down rather than raising them up.

Don Quixote is ultimately a novel about perception. The world of Don Quixote's delusions is constantly at odds with reality. He is constantly confronted by failure and cruelty yet persists in believing himself to be some sort of chivalric hero.
Naturally, the question the audience comes to is, is he right to do this? Is it better for Don Quixote to embrace his delusions and believe the world to be greater than it ever could be? Or should he just accept the reality that keeps throwing him down, that there is no such thing as giants, and that his donkey is simply a donkey? Is he mad, or is the world simply wrong? Should we perceive the world how we wish it to be, or how it is?
The novel possesses enough nuance that a reader can find the answer that personally appeals to him. All over it, you can find good, virtuous people, who live and act in such ways that would appeal to even the Don, people that exist in reality and not his delusions. Yet you are also shown cruel tricksters and pranksters who are constantly taking advantage of his good will and stupidity for their own gain and amusement, or we are shown the Don himself causing trouble for those around him because he is mad and sees villains where there are none. Personally, after reading Don Quixote's death, I can't help but feel that he was in the right. That the world lost someone great when he gave up

>>22906703
Not gunna let my Hidalgo slide off the catalog

>>22906703
for me, it was a treatise on the power of the imagination, and a pure, innocent heart; That you could transform the world around you into something beautiful, noble, and inspiring just by willing it into existence, and believing in it with every fiber of your soul. Why, in the first few chapters, he turns a whore house, two prostitutes, and a whoremaster into a castle, two ladies in waiting, and a King, just by willing it into existence and believing in it. Everyone calls him insane, but in many ways, he's the most sane one in the entire book, since only he has the strength and courage to make his dream a reality; The only one with a heart strong enough to live what he believes in. It's an extremely powerful and inspiring book, and there's a reason it has won the applause and admiration of men throughout all ages, regardless of country, background, or pursuits in life. If we were all more like Don Quixote, the world would be a better place.

>>22906703
No tenéis lengua para catarlo, pazguatos.

>>22909377
Absolutely based
Additionally what you bring up (the first sally) was the complete story of Quixote, it was a novella that ended with the library scene. It was popular enough that Cervantes wrote another 400 pages. But at testament to his genius, everything about this book's soul is there in the first 100 pages.

>>22906703
if you're retarded, you're gonna get beaten up by peasants and possibly made more retarded from physical trauma

>>22906703
A guy read too much capeshit and wanted to become a superhero. Then he realizes it was all dumb at the end. Then he dies.

That's literally it. It's not the kind of thing that has some kind of super deep hidden meaning.

>>22907933
It was absurd how hard he seemed to seethe at that shit. It made me curious about reading the fanfic although it seems hard to find it/a translation of it.

>>22906703
The first critique of the nascent bourgeoisie spirit that emerged from the primordial soup of renaissance capitalism against the aristocracy and its sensibilities and institutions...ironically enough from the pen of a spanish nobleman. Who was coincidentally also jewish. Cervantes should be understood as the first step in the development of a tradition that, after developing through figures like Erasmus, Goldoni, Lessing, Spinoza, etc. will culminate in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

a woefull knight

>>22909573
Does all Marxist literary criticism produce such embarrassing garbage as this?

>>22907311
made me kek

>>22909708
When a critique is made the question you should concern yourself with isn't whether the critique is valid or not but rather whose interests lie with critiquing the critiqued thing, whose legimitacy grows by delegitimizing the object of critique. Considering that the primary theme of european history between the beginning of the renaissance and the end of the 19th century is the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and the downfall of the aristocracy, it is impossible to not analyze literature made in that period in light of these processes of societal transformation.

>>22906703
I haven't read Don Quixote fully yet I think, and if I did I only partly and vaguely remember it, but parsing the scene where he fought windmills or my rememberance of that scene where I learned that that happens in that book, I think the book it is about the Dutch-Spanish, or Spanish-Dutch war of 1568-1648.

>>22909377
I think it’s something like this except much more of a tragicomic, ironic, ambiguous take on ideals as of heroism and chivalry than this uncritically adulatory one you seem to think the book is suggesting.

Think of Dostoyevsky’s Idiot.This book seems like a proto-version of that, except much more funny and set as an adventure story/picaresque in Spain centuries ago. Don Quixote is in a way noble and heroic, but on the literal level he’s also ridiculous, deluded, and overly idealistic. The world crushes this. So I think it’s Cervantes hilarious tragicomic take on this — how the world crushes our ideals, yet we still have that soft spot in our heart for those who try to be genuinely heroic and idealistic in this day and age like The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, Don Quixote.

>>22909573
>cervantes
>jewish
lol, lmao even. dubious claim with no legs to stand on.

>>22906703
Book II is a glib facsimile, and most likely a fake

>>22909838
One does not seethe that hard about someone writing fanfiction about his OC Donutsteel unless he wrote the original.

>>22909834
It is the consensus nowadays.

>>22909751
>When a critique is made the question you should concern yourself with isn't whether the critique is valid or not
This is actually the primary, arguably the only thing that matters. The other stuff you blabbered about is tertiary, if that

>>22906703
A literary attempt at an Anglo-Spanish rapprochement... By Sir Francis Bacon, Lord St. Alban!

>>22907333
He is lucid and highly intelligent when speaking on any other topic than chivalry, as remarked by many characters, especially in the 2nd book.

>>22909896
The consensus among disingenuous psueds perhaps. There is exactly 0 proof or documentation to imply this.

>>22909921
If only chivalry wasn't pure insanity...

>>22906703
Irony poisoning

>>22909920
More on this? Was Cervantes a fraud?

>>22909896
>>22909920
you faggots will really go to any length to deny the existence of a great man. you'll accept anything other than the idea that people like Cervantes and Shakespeare and Socrates are exactly what they seem to be

>>22910046
"Shakespeare" and "Cervantes" both "died" on the exact same day of the same year, April 23rd 1616

>>22906703
It's a genuine tragicomedy. The lampooning of the MC conceals the author's own nostalgia for a bygone age.

>>22906703
about me

>>22906703
It's a gag story composed by a single gag repeated over and over:
>Quixote is wrong about something because he's deluded because he's crazy because he's read too much fiction
>Sancho is right because he's a normal man, but it doesn't matter because Quixote has the social status
>Quixote acts according to his delusion
>Reality comes at them
>Quixote and Sancho pay for Quixote's actions
You can make it to be about de dangers of having a fiction filled brain, about social class and status, etc, but it's just a gag story written for you to laugh.

>>22907984
keep hoping im sure that will bare fruit eventually

>>22911028
So they were both fake?

>>22909896
no?

>>22907924
This

>>22906703
To mock the delusions held by men. Cervantes was a proto-Stirnerite.

You hace no idea at all.

The book is a critique of the idealism.

>>22907314
partially this, Cervantes (who sounds like he led a gnarly life) was calling out the phonies who wrote courtly love tales with what he saw as a hypocritical flowery emphasis on upholding chivalric codes in a world that was dumb and corrupt. Cervantes was using satire to skewer hypocrisy wrapped in flowery language

(Boccaccio's Decameron is also full of this)

Don Q is also full of good advice, it was meant to edify and have good and useful lessons as well as entertain.

I remember Miguel de Unamuno writing about a "Tragic Sense of Life" and I do think that underneath it all Cervantes is sympathetic to Don Q, not saying that we shouldn't try and fight the world but pointing out that we should discard illusions and realize that whoever tries this noble path of going against the flow instead of with it will probably have a rough time of it. but he wasn't just making fun of Don Q he was sympathetic to him I think.
I just got an old translation of it, maybe I'll take it with me on an upcoming trip. It's either Don Q, Ulysses, or Europe Central by William T Vollman I think

>>22907318
i think part of Cervantes' point is that the forgotten noble past is fictional though and that we're all deluded/willfully deluding ourselves

>>22907350
right
>the ideals of virtue, honesty and valor are very much real, but they are also definitely not forgotten, kept by kind honorable people
right. it's always the normal people, villagers and whatnot, who Cervantes holds up as decent and good

smokin on that shit that made Sancho Panza

>>22915198
Why would they give that warning when you're not supposed to inhale cigar smoke?